On the morning of Nov. 21, 2025, Astillo Sylvain made two 911 calls from the Mount Vernon rooming house where he lived to report Gregory Faulkner had chased him into a room with a knife.
Moments later, the 68-year-old Faulkner lay mortally wounded inside 158 Stevens Ave. with a knife wound to the abdomen. Sylvain was outside at the curb waiting for police to arrive.
He was arrested and charged with first-degree manslaughter. But on Monday, May 4, the charge was dismissed at the request of the Westchester District Attorney’s Office.
Assistant District Attorney Brian Bendish told state Supreme Court Justice James McCarty that prosecutors would be unable to sustain their burden of disproving Sylvain’s claim of justification, that he had killed Faulkner in self-defense.
Bendish said Sylvain never wavered from that account – not at the curb that morning, not in an interview later that day with detectives at headquarters and not at the DA’s Office when defense lawyer Joseph Marciano took the rare step of letting his client meet with prosecutors to answer some of their questions.
Bendish said that after reviewing the scene in the 2nd floor room, statements from Sylvain and witnesses, and surveillance video and taking into account other evidence, there was nothing to refute the defendant’s claims.
After highlighting that it was Sylvain who called police to the scene and didn’t flee after knifing Faulkner, McCarty approved the application, dismissed the criminal charge and sealed the file.
Marciano thanked the prosecution for its due diligence and as they left the court Bendish wished Sylvain good luck. Sylvain, 33, and Marciano declined to comment afterwards.
Faulkner’s death was one of two homicides in Mount Vernon that day. And while most homicides in Westchester get resolved by trial or a guilty plea, neither case that day went the distance.
The second, unrelated, was the fatal shooting late that night of a Bronx 17-year-old, Jayden Maraj, at Eastchester and Mundy lanes about two blocks from his home. The suspect in that killing, Assam Alshaif, was never charged but was himself killed in the Bronx in March 2026, in apparent retaliation for Maraj’s death.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Homicide charge dropped against Mount Vernon man who knifed man in self-defense
Reporting by Jonathan Bandler, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
